firmly ambivalent

...staying a safe distance back at all times...

Sunday, January 09, 2005

ELFRIEDE JELINEK WILL LOVE THIS IDEA

I'm sure that Margaret Atwood's worldwide fanbase will be happy to learn that she finds them to be a nuisance. How else to explain the absurd plan to implement the use of a "remote book signing machine" that will preclude the phenomenon of travelling far and wide to perform this menial and detestable task. Having ostensibly succumbed to Weltschmerz, she seems also to have forgotten the pride and honour that she is sure to have felt on her very first book tour, wherever and whenever that might have been.

As far as the proposed invention being "a democratising device, which could help authors who were not stars [unlike Atwood], and often missed out on signing tours", this is just a transparent excuse to distract her adoring readers from the fact she has outgrown their usefulness, and plans to live out the rest of her years comfortably, albeit curmudgeonly, in her Annex home in Toronto, in which one room will no doubt be newly designated as the autograph-signing-room. I hope she feels quite silly as she sits primed to write some falsely cheerful inscription to a person with whom she will never come face to face.